The following message by Superintendent of Schools Doug Schuch was shared with the RSD13 community on Feb. 2:

The Regional School District 13 Board of Education and Leadership Team have proposed that we renovate and expand Memorial School to serve all learners in Grades K-5.

We will be sharing more details about this exciting project during the next several months, but we wanted to let you know why we believe that this is the right decision for our learners, families, employees, and community:

Limits school transitions — Learners will only attend three schools (Memorial/Strong/Coginchaug) during their K-12 experience.

Unifies our district — All learners and families will have access to all district educational programming.

Balances experiences in Durham and Middlefield — Both of our towns will host all of our learners for about the same number of years.

Aligns with our vision for Learner-Centered Education — All of our K-5 staff, resources, professional learning will focus on a single school.

In addition to all of these educational benefits, this plan will bring significant savings to the budgets and taxpayers of Middlefield and Durham by:

Greatly reducing operational costs; Improving operational efficiency and services to learners; Taking advantage of state funding, currently estimated at 52% of the total project cost.

Please be on the lookout for future project updates, and also let us know what you think about expanding and renovating Memorial School [via] ThoughtExchange.